According to Kalu Okoronkwo, Nigeria’s higher education system has to be strengthened in order to establish it as a center for academic achievement and innovation.
Significant progress has been made in Nigeria’s higher education system, mostly due to the emergence of private tertiary institutions. This rise in the higher education sector has, in a sense, ushered in a period of enormous transformation for academic institutions across the nation and made the country’s education system vibrant and globally competitive.
In the early 1980s, the Nigerian government opened the door for the private sector to become involved in providing its citizens with high-quality tertiary education because it recognized the growing demand for higher education and the need for varied academic offerings.
The first private university in Nigeria, the Babcock University, was established in 1984 by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This marked a historic milestone, paving the way for other faith-based and privately-owned institutions.
With this development, Nigerian owned tertiary institutions now rank alongside most prized universities of the Western world that has hitherto held serious attraction for Nigeria’s “nouveau riche” with the consequences of encouraging education tourism or brain drain that has eroded the country’s rich intellectual capital.
Prior to this period, the country’s higher education sector was predominantly public, with government-owned universities and polytechnics being the primary providers of tertiary education.
As with most establishments of governments in Africa and especially in Nigeria, the predominance of the public tertiary education sector by governments especially the federal and state governments was not without its debilitating challenges.
Among the predominant challenge of the government owned private institutions was the incessant strikes by Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU), a labour union established in 1978 when university lecturers in the country, dissatisfied with the state of higher education, formed the union.
Their primary aim was to advocate for improved working conditions, better pay, and a more conducive environment for teaching and research. The nascent union embarked on a journey that would come to shape the course of Nigeria’s higher education albeit, negatively as the strikes kept students at home sometimes for over a year and in most cases courses with duration of four years saw students spending five to six years minimum.
The recurring strikes by ASUU, which often centered around issues such as salary discrepancies, infrastructure deficiencies, and inadequate funding for universities, became a characteristic feature of Nigeria’s higher education journey
